


Alluvium - Chapter 1

by AWizardWithoutHerStaff



Series: Alluvium - Uprooted from Sarkan's POV [1]
Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Canon Rewrite, F/M, POV Sarkan, Rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23530933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AWizardWithoutHerStaff/pseuds/AWizardWithoutHerStaff
Summary: I reached the girl who had stared at me with such fire and loathing not a moment before, cupping her chin in my hand and jerking her face up to meet mine. I almost felt her magic then, but I didn’t realise it, too preoccupied with the filth of her dress and the mess of her hair.This is a fun rewrite of 'Uprooted' by Naomi Novik, from the point of view of our most prickly and sarcastic of Dragons, Sarkan.It follows the book very closely and it will spoil stuff from the story. Really, it's just a fun exercise in point of view and characterisation.This is Chapter 1 - a mirror of the actual Chapter 1 of Uprooted. The story and dialogue belong to Naomi Novik.I have no idea what will come of this or how much I will do, but I intend to do more of it the book for as long as it's still fun.
Relationships: Agnieszka/The Dragon | Sarkan
Series: Alluvium - Uprooted from Sarkan's POV [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693372
Comments: 37
Kudos: 77





	Alluvium - Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This project was born out of the Covid-19 pandemic, when I couldn't focus on writing my own work properly, and therefore decided to just do something creative and indulgent and fun.
> 
> It's an exercise in point of view and experimenting with a character's voice, so that has been so much fun.
> 
> Sarkan here is - in some ways - harder to write than I expected: hard to write his loneliness when he's so god damned deluded about it himself. It's important to me that he's still an ass at the start, even if he can't see it himself (not hard with Naomi Novik's incredible dialogue).
> 
> As it's a fun distraction for me, it's unpolished and unedited, so excuse any mistakes. I hope it's still fun.
> 
> Hope everyone is safe and well out there  
> xxx

# Alluvium - Uprooted from Sarkan's POV

## Chapter 1

Eat them? What a completely preposterous notion. No, I do not _eat_ the girls I take. I can’t believe even a half-brained peasant would believe that nonsense, whether they were from outside this valley or not. I am _the_ Dragon, not _a_ dragon; it’s a name I earned with a not inconsiderable amount of power and skill – and I suppose you could say this is my valley, though I never meant to lay claim to this sorry scrap of land.

It’s not a poor ‘lordship,’ as they go. The land is fertile enough: there are farms from my tower to the southern mountains – cattle, sheep, and forests – and in a good year, the people of the valley will not go hungry. They’re a different sort. Oh, they’re peasants, much like any other, but they’re harder people, toughened by what they’ve seen and by what it’s taken, and so they leave me well enough alone; more than I can say for those idiots at court.

These villagers know that I protect them, that without me the Wood would swallow them up faster than a king’s wizard swallows his pride. They all know to fear it. Its shadow is cast across this valley, its long fingers already brushing up against the nearest villages: Zatochek, Dvernik – none of them have escaped its clawing grasp.

This valley is a battleground: a last stand in the war against the Wood; except that instead of soldiers, I have farmers, woodcutters and children, and instead of an enemy I can fight, I have _that_. The Wood. An enemy so ancient and unknowable than even Jaga couldn’t plumb the darkness at the heart of it. A thousand years, or more, it has stood, a dark wall between us and Rosya, and every year it is growing.

I am losing this war, inch by inch, and when I am gone, I suspect the valley will go with me.

So, I take the girls because I have to, and the villagers let me because I protect them. And I don’t _devour_ them – I don’t lay a hand on them. If anything, I _free_ them. They come to me coarse and ignorant, as unrefined as grey flint, and I teach them – show them a life they could barely have imagined, teach them manners and grace. After their time here, they go to university, move to cities beyond the shadow of the Wood, marry - and well - thanks to the silver I give them.

One even weaselled her way into the heart of one Duke Ivanov. She was an especially beautiful creature, and smarter than was good for a village girl from Polosna. She’d seduced half the court by the time I saw her there, though she avoided my presence with a deftness I was forced to admire. Perhaps she feared that I would out her as the simple peasant girl that she truly was, or maybe— well, it hardly matters. She had her new life and I have mine.

So, I do not end their lives: I begin them. And I hardly ask for much in return. I know that life here isn’t easy, that _I_ am not easy. I know that I take them away from their lives and their families. Ten years I take from them. But in return, I give them knowledge, and I pluck them from the Wood’s grasp, pull them out from beneath its shadow – uproot them from this cursed place.

They get freedom and an escape from the Wood, which is more than I can expect for myself.

I hate the ceremony, and it seems to march upon me quicker every decade. What is ten years, truly, in a life as long as mine?

I bid farewell to the girl the night before. It was a simple matter: I thanked her for her service to her lord and gestured to the bag of silver on the table by the door. She curtseyed in answer – she knew her role well, this one – and she took the silver, straight-backed and silent, her eyes glittering with the knowledge that comes to them all eventually.

It isn’t fear, yet. That will come later. But that isn’t my concern. She will feel it when she descends to the valley floor and sits in her family’s kitchen, the Wood’s presence looming like a shadow at the back of her mind.

She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t feel the need to add anything further, so I dismissed her to her freedom. I crooked a finger, felt the easy pull of familiar magic, and opened the great doors of my tower. A horse and cart from Olshanka were waiting for her, crowded with peering faces – her family, I suppose. I could feel their eyes as much as I could see them, fear and awe plain in their expressions. Not just of me, of course: I doubt they recognise the scrawny, scrap of a creature which came to me ten years ago.

Finally, my tower was my own again. For one brief, welcome night. My footsteps rang hollowly off stone as I ascended to the library. Peace waited for me there. Familiar wooden shelves laden with familiar friends, their covers ordered and gleaming in the lamplight. I drew one from the shelf, its leather cover slipping into my hands with hardly a whisper. Retiring to my chair, I drew the thin table across my knees and set the book across it, the creaking pages throwing up the scent of dust and parchment and knowledge.

I did not miss the sound of clattering, clanging utensils from the kitchen. I did not miss the thick aroma of cooking drifting up the stairs to infect the whole tower with its stench. And I certainly did not miss the footsteps on the stairs or the soft echo of her voice as she hummed her way to the top of the tower. Peace. At last.

But my mind was not at peace. The working should have been simple enough. I could see the parts of it which would give a lesser wizard trouble, but not for nothing was I called the greatest wizard in Polnya – a hundred years away from court and still they could not refute that. Yet my mind would not focus on the words, the letters and symbols sliding before my eyes. I knew why.

It felt like a whispering threat at the back of my mind. Without the girl, I had lost my connection to the valley: I felt weak and exposed. It knew, somehow, I could feel it. It loomed at the very edge of my awareness, testing my defences. An absurd notion, surely. I could no more sense the mood of the Wood than it could sense mine. I was being foolish: as superstitious as some village hedgewitch. 

Yet my eyes had drifted, unfocused, to the window, and I felt myself rise to peer out into the darkness. Night had fallen in its entirety, blanketing the valley in darkness. Even then, I could still see it. A deeper black against the night. It shifted in the wind, a whisper which rolled along its edge: a promise and a threat.

I did not have to reach for the ledger to feel the weight of it, the ink hardly dry from the names of the last it had taken. Its last great incursion had been the Green Summer. Had that been this decade? Like a fool, I’d be away when the danger had come – called to court on some pointless, trivial formality. A pitiful waste of time, and of lives. By the time I returned to call fire onto the foul, misshapen mess, the Wood had already claimed its victims.

They went mad, the ones who ate the deformed crops, running out into the Wood to never be seen again – or worse, they emerged later, smiling and murderous, full of the Wood’s foul intent. The ones who didn’t eat the harvest near-enough starved. I saved who I could: a vast fortune of potions wasted on peasants. It wasn’t enough.

That had surely been before the last ceremony. _More_ than a decade even. It was waiting, biding its time. But for what, I wondered. The cloud of uncertainty followed me up the narrow spiralling stairs and into my bedchamber, and I was still staring at the crimson canopy of my bed when the sun hauled itself above the horizon.

The ceremony was to be in Dvernik this year, for some trivial reason, a good deal further from my tower and less civilised than the usual Olshanka. Not that it truly mattered: the working which allowed me to travel through the valley was simple enough. _Zokinen valisu, akenezh hinisu, kozhonen valisu –_ the words rolled easily off my tongue and I stepped forward from my library and out onto the village green of Dvernik.

I saw the shudder in them as I arrived, the involuntary flinch of fear. I suppose I must appear strange to them: a hundred years I have ruled these lands, and yet the immortality of wizards preserves me much as I was in my third decade of life. And I suppose they thought I didn’t see the hatred there too, but I did. I was there to take one of their daughters, after all, and their hostility rolled out towards me, as cold as the October breeze. One of the ‘dragon-born’ girls stared at me with such violent animosity that it felt like the hot breath of magic against my skin.

I stiffened myself against it, held myself as their lord should, and yet there was nothing I wanted more than to be done with this and get back to the quiet solitude of my tower.

The headwoman bowed to me and said, ‘My lord, let me present to you—’

‘Yes, let’s get on with it,’ I said, sparing her the pointless formalities; I could save us both some time.

They’d paraded the girls out onto the green in their finest, all spun wool and braided hair, though some of them clearly much finer than others. It’s no secret that I will take the finest of them. If I am to endure being shut up in a tower with some ignorant peasant for ten years, I might as well make it as tolerable as possible. I looked at each of them in turn, not looking for _beauty_ necessarily, though it certainly doesn’t hurt. There will be something to her: sometimes it’s beauty, sometimes kindness, sometimes she’ll have half a wit to go with that, if I’m extremely lucky.

I reached the girl who had stared at me with such fire and loathing not a moment before, cupping her chin in my hand and jerking her face up to meet mine. I almost felt her magic then, but I didn’t realise it, too preoccupied with the filth of her dress and the mess of her hair. I was stunned that her family had allowed her to appear before me in such a state. Perhaps this was some attempt to deflect my attention from her – protect their precious daughter from my gaze.

Little did I know, this would prove to be the most respectable I would ever see her.

‘Your name, girl?’ I asked.

She croaked something barely audible. Not so much fire in her now, I thought with some satisfaction.

‘Agnieszka,’ she finally managed. Adding, ‘my lord,’ almost as an afterthought.

I dropped her chin and stepped to the next girl, and then smiled despite myself. Yes, she would do. She was beautiful, you couldn’t argue with that, her thick hair spun into a braid like woven gold, her features sculpted and fine. But more than that, she held herself with dignity, with a straight back and an air which set her loftily above these farmers’ daughters.

‘Kasia, my lord,’ she answered me clear as a bell when I asked her name, no stuttering or snivelling or averting her gaze.

I carried on to the end of the line, but I was eager to be done with this tiresome business. When I returned to the girl, I smiled with a profound sense of relief.

But this time I did feel her, the girl with the hate in her eyes, her power leaking out of her in an untidy torrent of power. She’d grabbed the hand of the golden-haired girl and was staring wild defiance into my face, until I turned and settled my eyes back on her. She quailed under that gaze but her power did not: it was unmistakeable. Of all the rotten, ill-conceived luck.

I had to be sure, so I conjured a light – nothing extravagant – a simple ball of flame in the palm of my hand. The peasants quailed anyway.

‘She didn’t mean anything,’ her beautiful friend spoke, as if that could undo this misfortune. ‘Please, my lord—’

‘Silence girl,’ I bit out, my patience at its limit. I held out my hand to the wild, mess of a girl in front of me. ‘Take it.’

‘I— what?’ she said dumbly.

‘Don’t stand there like a cretin,’ I said. ‘ _Take it._ ’

And she did, clumsily, getting her fingers all caught in mine as she did so. She cupped it in her hands, the blue-white light illuminating every smear of dirt, every knot of her hair, but she held it easily. I couldn’t help but feel put-out. I’d come for the most beautiful of the dragon-born girls and I was being forced to take the very least of them, and I’d have to train a thick-headed peasant apprentice, besides.

‘Well, you then, I suppose,’ I managed with a degree of good grace; a marvel considering the circumstances. At least now we could leave.

‘Send the tribute up when you can,’ I said to the headwoman, taking my unwilling apprentice by her arm. She was too dim to even have fully grasped her circumstances, let alone the extent of her power. She tumbled after me like a heavy ragdoll as I pulled her through into the tower.

She was sick – actually sick – as soon as we stepped into the room at the top of the tower. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to one of the girls, of course, but it was certainly the most dramatic; she even managed to catch the edge of my _boot_. I couldn’t help but recoil in disgust. And it was one thing for a simple peasant girl to empty her stomach at a simple transport spell, but quite another for a prospective witch.

‘Useless,’ I uttered, confounded by the idea of _teaching_ this wretched creature. ‘Stop heaving, girl, and clean that filth up.’

I left her then, hoping it would give her some time to recover her wits; I had suffered quite enough of people for one day. The top floor of the tower was nothing much, but it would have everything she needed, for now. I made sure the lamps were lit – smooth polished stone, illuminated by soft magic, its glow gentler than fire would have been.

I stepped down the winding stairs with an almost audible sigh of relief. It was done. Another ceremony, another girl – though I could see that this one would trouble me a great deal more than any of the girls who came before her.

A peasant with the gift, in _my_ valley, and I hadn’t known – hadn’t even thought to look for it among the common folk, least of all in a waif of a Dragon-born girl. How long had she floundered out there in Dvernik, a ripe cherry waiting to be plucked by the Wood? How much longer would she have stayed there if she hadn’t been presented to me on a platter? To think of the monstrosity it could have made from her: she had been perhaps the greatest threat to this valley in a hundred years, and I _had not noticed her_.

I was angry, I realised, as I entered my laboratory; my shoulders were tight and my jaw was aching. I picked up three different flasks and set them back on the bench without looking at them. How had I failed to notice her?

I couldn’t focus on a single task for more than a moment, my thoughts entirely fractured by one witch-child villager from Dvernik, and I achieved nothing in the entire span of an hour. I let myself wallow in a black mood, truthfully, bitter that my hand had been forced – that I’d had to take on such a sorry choice of apprentice. I was very likely still angry when I stepped out onto the landing: angry with myself for being ignorant and blind, and angry with her simply for existing.

It was exactly then, of course, that she crashed head-long into me.

‘Ooft,’ the air went out of me in a gasp, and I had barely enough time to grab on to the railing and catch her before we both plummeted to our probable deaths. She clutched onto my coat and gazed straight up into my face, forgetting for a moment to be afraid of me. Her pale cheeks were flushed with surprise and her eyes were wide and bright, like deep pools of water, and I was so startled that I gaped uselessly at her before I realised what I was doing.

All of my anger raced up to meet my embarrassment and I took her and dumped her back on the landing, my fingers still curled around her arm. _Never_ in all my years had I been bowled into in such a fashion. Most of the girls barely accosted me in ten years, let alone physically assaulting me on the first day. She was like a feral cat: half fear, half teeth and claws, fur on end with a fierceness I’d never seen before.

‘I’m looking for the kitchen!’ she blurted out, as if that somehow explained everything.

‘ _Are you_?’ I asked, not even trying to hide my outrage. I pulled her face close to mine, peering into those wide brown eyes. I could feel her power then: a flickering unstable heartbeat, like the flutter of a bird’s wings. She was tall for a valley girl and stared defiantly full into my face; no quiet, cowed respect from this peasant for her lord. ‘Perhaps I’d better show you there,’ I said, reduced to a porter in my own home. Perhaps once she could find her way, I might get some damnable peace.

‘I can— I can—’ she babbled something as she squirmed away from me, but I ignored her.

I held onto her arm as I led her down to kitchen, unwilling to let go in case she flung herself at my back and made another attempt on my life. What a fine joke that would be: Sarkan, the Dragon, greatest wizard of Polnya, killed on his stairs by a witless peasant. Maybe the Wood would laugh itself into oblivion.

And yet, even with that thought, I failed to predict her next attack. When we entered the kitchen, she screamed, a vicious ear-piercing shriek, scrabbling at me as if she truly were that mad, feral cat I had imagined. She kicked out at my shin and we both toppled over together, hard against the floor. I smacked my head against the cold stone, leaving me wrung out and disorientated. All I could do for a moment was pant and stare at the ceiling, unable to believe what was happening.

‘Are you deranged?’ I asked, stunned, her limbs still tangled with mine.

I looked towards the kitchen fire, the flames crackling harmlessly in the hearth, trying to find some earthly reason for her insanity. Kitchen utensils hung unassumingly to either side of it, a single cookbook left unattended on a table. _Nothing_ which could have provoked such madness.

And then, she said, ‘I thought you were going to throw me in the oven,’ and started to _laugh_ , madly, hysterically, as if the whole thing were some fantastic joke.

I don’t know what offended me more – the laughter, or that she’d thought I meant to throw her in the fire. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen such laughter, let alone directed at _me_. I kicked myself free of her and sprang up to my feet, backing away as if her madness were contagious. For the first time in near a hundred years, I didn’t know what to do. I felt aggrieved, as if someone had _done_ this to me, setting this lunatic on me and my tower.

In the end, I walked away, leaving her to rave on the kitchen floor. What else was I supposed to do? My cheeks were burning as I ascended the winding stairs, as if I were the one who had humiliated myself by having a fit and throwing myself on the ground. And this— this madwoman was to be trained as a witch. By me. I rubbed my temples with the tips of my fingers, a sudden headache creeping in behind them.

Back in my laboratory, I closed the door at my back, as if half afraid to venture back out into my own tower. The warm air was filled with the sharp scent of sulphur and bubbling fire-heart, and a thin autumnal sunlight steamed in through the tall windows, pale and yellow, glinting off the racks of bottles and tools across my bench. I breathed it in, slowly, evenly.

This. This made sense.

I licked the tip of one finger and flicked over the page of a well-worn tome. Its sketches and diagrams were as familiar to me as an old friend, and it helped to see them. I slid open a small wooden drawer and retrieved the vial I wanted, exactly where I had left it, and unstoppered it to tip its contents into a flask of yellow-green liquid.

 _‘Polzhyt,_ ’ I uttered with a hint of power, lighting the candle under the beaker with white-hot flame. The smallest bubbles started to form at the bottom of the glass before drifting up to the surface, just as I had expected, and the acrid scent which hit the back of my throat was almost reassuring.

I turned a wooden hourglass over on the table and set to work.

I didn’t see her for the rest of the day, and I began to imagine that perhaps this was over with. That she had experienced some degree of distress upon arrival here was, perhaps, understandable. No doubt, by now she would have gathered her wits and things might return to some semblance of normality. I’d still have to teach her, but for that there was certainly no great hurry: if there’s one thing our kind have, it’s time. At least, here in the tower and under my eye, there was no great damage she could do.

I retired to my library in the evening. The sun was sinking towards the horizon, catching its light in the underside of the high, cirrus clouds and painting them in waves of gaudy pink and gold. The spindle glittered darkly in its winding path through the valley, looking for all the world like a normal river, before it slunk away into the darkness of the woods never to emerge again.

The celebrations were still ongoing in the valley, bright burning points of light at each of the villages and jovial voices echoing up from the valley floor. Tables would be sagging under the harvest, villagers dancing, singing – a great deal of commotion. I didn’t begrudge them it. That they could find such pleasure, trapped as they were in the web of the Wood— well, I wasn’t going to take that from them.

I returned to my chair and brought the table across my knee. I heaved open the heavy leather cover, the binding creaking with the exertion, and turned back to my workings from the previous night. My mind was calmer – clearer – and I felt myself sink deeply into the reading of it, soothed by the echoing calls from the valley and the clean, quiet peace of the tower.

I didn’t hear her approach the door, so it startled me out of my work when she spoke, ‘I’ve— I’ve brought dinner.’

‘Really?’ I asked, sharper than I meant to, feeling my focus scatter to all the corners of the room. ‘Without falling into a pit along the way? I’m astonished.’

I looked up from the book then, which was a mistake. I drank in the sight of her in mute astonishment. I’d thought before she was untidy, but this was— she was _filthy_ , an ungodly mess of stains, mud and torn fabric. Her hair was one great snarled knot hanging about her shoulders, her skin was plastered with soot and grease from the kitchen and— and was that _butter_ smeared on her chin? It was the sight of her here which truly offended me, standing stark against the clean lines of my library, and the bright, polished white stone of the hallway. She was an unsightly blemish hung in my doorway.

‘Or _did_ you fall in a pit?’ I asked. It was the only reasonable explanation.

‘I was— I cooked, and I cleaned—’ she said.

 _Cleaned?_ I almost snorted at the idea.

‘The dirtiest thing in this tower is _you_ ,’ I said, which was entirely true.

She started to lay out her offering of dinner, such as it was, and I resigned myself to the end of my work. I closed the book and pushed it to one side, coming to see if there was any redemption for this girl in her cooking.

There was not. Everything was cold and congealed, a mess of grey soup and sliding, melted butter: I could identify the source of maybe half of the mess on her dress, at most; the other stains remained an impenetrable mystery.

‘I see why you were afraid I might roast you,’ I said, more amazed than angry at this point: she was a fascinating disaster. ‘You would make a better meal than this.’

‘I’m not a splendid cook, but—’ she stuttered.

I did snort then, perhaps unkindly. ‘Is there anything you _can_ do?’

And there it was again. Instead of a cowed, quivering retreat, she seemed to straighten in resistance to me, those eyes glittering with bright defiance. She looked at me in a way no one had dared to look at me in more years than I can count.

She flung the tray down and cried, ‘Why did you take me, then? Why didn’t you take Kasia?’

I blinked. She still had no notion at all of what she was. ‘Who?’

‘Kasia!’ Her mouth hung open like she intended to catch flies in it. I stared at her, no notion at all of what on earth she was talking about. ‘You were going to take her! She’s— she’s clever, and brave, and a splendid cook, and—’

It was as if she wanted to remind me of the great misfortune of her choosing, rubbing salt on a raw and ugly wound.

‘Yes,’ I bit out, my patience long past its frayed ends. ‘I do recall the girl: neither horse-faced nor a slovenly mess, and I imagine would not be yammering at me this very minute: enough. You village girls are all tedious at the beginning, more or less, but you’re proving a truly remarkable paragon of incompetence.’

‘Then you needn’t keep me,’ she said, flaring up like a spluttering flame.

As if there were any choice in this, as if I’d have _chosen_ to take her.

‘Much to my regret,’ I said, ‘that’s where you’re wrong.’

Now was as good a time as any to show her why – to show her why we were both stuck with this, and with each other. I stood close behind her and stretched her hand out over the food; at least I could put it to some use and not starve before the end of it.

‘ _Lirintalem,_ ’ I said the simple cantrip, holding back my own power and waiting for hers. ‘Say it with me.’

‘What?’ It was like trying to communicate with a block of wood, she absorbed my words and reflected back nothing but a dead sound.

‘ _Say it,’_ I hissed at her ear.

She did, then. And it worked, as I knew it would, the power stampeding out of her. There was nothing wrong with her magic, at least. The congealed grey mess she had brought me rippled into something half palatable: roast chicken, spring beans, apple tart studded with raisins and glazed with honey. It lacked imagination but it would do.

Satisfied, I let go of her. To my great surprise, she staggered, half slumped against the table. Her breath came in tiny short gasps and her skin had paled to an ashen grey. She stared up at me with those accusing eyes, her face a picture of horror, as if I had done some terrible injustice to her. I almost felt the guilt she intended.

‘What did you do to me?’ she whispered, as if _I_ had sucked all the magic out of her and left her a trembling mess.

‘Stop whining,’ I snapped defensively. ‘It’s nothing more than a cantrip.’ It was the same fear they all had, that look of immediate distrust when they realised what you were. I had no time for it. Enough. I flicked my hand at the door and sat heavily before my dinner. ‘All right, get out. I can see you’ll be wasting inordinate amounts of my time, but I’ve had enough for the day.’

I heard her, limping and scraping her way back to the top of the tower. It must have taken her all of half an hour to climb the stairs. Such dramatics for such a simple cantrip. I couldn’t fathom what had caused her to flop about in such a fashion – her power was greater than this, I could feel it. Yet another mystery from Agnieszka, daughter of Dvernik.

I did check on her in the end. I’m not entirely heartless. She’d left her room ajar when she’d staggered in and passed out on the bed, still gowned in all her filth. I did not enter, hovering at the doorway, looking for any sign that she had hurt herself with magic. There was nothing.

She was depleted, unconscious, her mouth hanging open and her dark hair curled in soft ringlets around her face. She’d pulled in on herself, her long limbs pressed tightly against her chest, her breath slow and even. She managed to be tidier in sleep than she ever managed in wakefulness. I felt a soft urge to reach out and cover her with the blanket, but I quashed it immediately. Truthfully, I feared the look she would give me if she woke and found me in her room.

Instead I backed quietly away, closing the door softly behind me.


End file.
